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Enpi / Wanshu opening bunkai

A while back I posted a short clip of me doing a drill from my syllabus back in 2008 in response to a series of excellent clips looking at applications for Enpi / Wanshu. Here's a new video shot in September of the same movement with a little bit of explanation.

I can't say I've ever had a situation where the attacker hasn't released grip. It's one of the reasons the drill has stuck in the syllabus.

I looked at hitting to the groin, but eventually we discarded it because

1. No one wanted to hit the groin even lightly in practice.

2. The groin is less biomechanically certain to get the movement desired than striking to the inside thigh. I've known people take groin shots and not move at all, I've never known anyone take an inside leg shot and not move. It's still there as a redundancy.

Thanks for the response, it's made me think through the possibilities some more.

Hypothetically speaking then, what would you do if you couldn't pull the hands apart? Sorry to bring it up again but I think it's a highly dangerous possibility that needs addressing, particularly if you're losing consciousness at the time.

Thanks for the response, it's made me think through the possibilities some more.

Hypothetically speaking then, what would you do if you couldn't pull the hands apart? Sorry to bring it up again but I think it's a highly dangerous possibility that needs addressing, particularly if you're losing consciousness at the time.

We rarely do this with the hands together - gripping. That kind of head lock position is extremely uncommon here as the head encirclement comes from a desire to grab to control before hitting with the other hand rather than a deliberate headlock. Wrestling is not a school sport here and this posiiton is pretty rare compared to the head encirclement when facing in the same direction. Regardless though it does not chnage the key principles of escape.

Essentially from this position your safe options, that do not increase the stress on your spine, are to attack the main encircling arm and to attack/move the body. Although I don't draw as much attention to it in the video as perhaps I should, you will notice that I am holding the encircling arm. I'm doing that to apply constant pressure away from my neck while at the same time I'm attacking the wrist. The first strike to the leg is an upleasant one - it hits a sensitive area with the full force of the body drop (which adds to the pulling pressure taking the encircling arm away form the neck). In some people that will be the end of it - job done. The combination of a strike to that point plus the wrist grab was a common pressure point knock out at demonstrations a decade ago - I don't expect it to knock the guy out, but the redundancy is the secondary strike to the back of the leg. We do these with armour on and they don't fail to shift people.

In terms of striking you have to think of your targets. Groin, inside thigh, outside thigh are pretty much all you have open to you and all need tobe hit with as much power as you can muster. I don't adivse reaching up to try and grab the face or neck - - it places greater stress on your own spine and is unlikely ot do much. I don't advise trying to grab the groin unless your attacker has a loose tracksuit on - you're really not likley to be able to grab a guy's nuts in most trousers. The body drop works here as it allows a greater transference of force through the target. If the legs are the other way round I would advise working outside - inside rather than inside to outside - it's not as good but it still works.

The guillotine is a fairly common MMA move, however at present MMA is not so common that we are seeing lots of guillotines in self protection situations. I can't ever see it becoming as common as the haymaker or head butt unless MMA or wrestling go into the school PE curriculum.

Ref your difficulty with the drill, there are two things I think might be causing problems. One is the common training problem of mismatched force. If your partner is really trying to guillotine you then you should really be trying to break his leg with the amount of force you are putting into the leg strikes. If you aren't doing that and he is seriously trying to guillotine you then you will experience failure. This is one of the reasons that when we test this full pelt the recipient wears armour that covered both the inside and outside thigh - done properly there is a high risk of femoral artery haemorage. The second is letting your training partner actually achieve a good guillotine before you even start to move. That will stack the odds against you as with any good attack to the neck where the attacker achieves their desired position before you respond. This drill is on my syllabus because it is the most reliable full contact pressure tested response we've found so far to this position, and we make it work (with proper contact) time and time again. If you know a better pressure tested way of getting out of this position then please direct me to a video as that is far more imporant to me than a piece of Kata bunkai. I'll then try it and keep the most reliable one in my syllabus!

Thanks for the video. The second variation is closest to the form, although the hand movement does have a different dynamic to create the throw. Still interesting though.

Good points, and fair to say that I wasn't heavily striking, but that's not really necessary against the LV9 point, however it isn't really the strike that's the issue, it is the drop part. In fact the strike is used in a variant of the (tried and pressure-tested ) technique that we use to escape from the standing guillotine, which is demonstrated in the second variant in this clip (it's a Jeet Kune Do clip, but is the closest I could find to the version we use, everything else seems to be BJJ!)

One other thing that occcurs to me is that the strike itself isn't one of the kata moves and whilst I accept that you say it's incorporated into bringing the hands together at the start of the kata, could this also be indicating that you need to be 'attacking' from that side, and maybe (without becoming fixated on my suggestion - because I don't know the 'theme' of the kata as we don't practice it) the knee-drop kata guruma still fits if you step/turn slightly away/back from the opponent to achieve the initial kuzushi?

Good points, and fair to say that I wasn't heavily striking, but that's not really necessary against the LV9 point, however it isn't really the strike that's the issue, it is the drop part. In fact the strike is used in a variant of the (tried and pressure-tested ) technique that we use to escape from the standing guillotine, which is demonstrated in the second variant in this clip (it's a Jeet Kune Do clip, but is the closest I could find to the version we use, everything else seems to be BJJ!)

One other thing that occcurs to me is that the strike itself isn't one of the kata moves and whilst I accept that you say it's incorporated into bringing the hands together at the start of the kata, could this also be indicating that you need to be 'attacking' from that side, and maybe (without becoming fixated on my suggestion - because I don't know the 'theme' of the kata as we don't practice it) the knee-drop kata guruma still fits if you step/turn slightly away/back from the opponent to achieve the initial kuzushi?

Thanks for getting back to me.

My focus isn't so much on LV9 as SP10 on the inside leg. It's one of my favourites!

Ref theinitial right to left strike that I make with the forearm (and yes, I don't punch this any more myself - I can do far more damage with far less risk of failure with my forearm) to the inside leg, it's just an interpretation. As I show in the video, I demonstrate this standing from a different angle and position, and Katharii showed another good idea a while back, as did Iain. It's more of a change of the timing than a big alteration of theKata move IMO.

Thanks for the clip. I wasn't so fond of the groin slap variant as we've had failures with that (missing the testicles or the testicles being protected by the clothing (eg tight jeans as opposed to loose sweat pants), or the testicles being drawn tight up to the body etc). I liked the second walk through variant. From my perspective it brought the hands together with a body drop as per Enpi, but he walked through without hitting SP10 (until the final demo, but I think he was dummying slapping the groin there) which was an obvious target to me to reinforce the movement and cause distraction through pain and unbalancing. I liked the move through to the arm bar as we use that position quite a bit. Another thing I like about this is that I can loop it into the Heian Flow System when I'm teaching that to Karateka. I'll have a play with that follow through.